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All life-events are significant!

Submitted by Isto Huvila on Wed, 10/12/2016 - 13:52

Prof. Ian Ruthwen (University of Strathclyde) held an interesting keynote at 2016 edition of the ISIC - Information Behaviour Conference in Zadar, Croatia. He talked about information behaviours (sic!) related to significant life events and made broadly remarks on what is significant in significant life events and how these aspects have possible repercussions on how people deal with information.

At the same time, his remarks could be seen as thought-provoking on how people work with information on not-so-significant-life-events and how a significance of a life-event actually can be question of different shades of grey rather than a binary condition. To a certain extent you could probably argue that any event that trigger explicit information interactions is a significant life-event with similar mechanisms (even if they would play out to a considerably less dramatic degree) that are pertinent to such stereotypic significant life-events as serious illness, death of a relative, marriage, change of job, or something similar.

Conference featured also several other interesting papers and posters (abstract can be found on the ISIC conference website), and the session with the participants of the doctoral forum gave a lot of promise of the future of the information behaviour research (including information practices related and other research focussing on how people deal with information independent of how individual researchers have chosen to call it). My own paper discussed distrust, mistrust and untrust as related but independent states of (non-)trust that should be taken into account when discussing trust in the context of information research. The HIBA project was presented in poster form, and I had also an opportunity (that your for organisers) to participate in an interesting and important panel on the present and future of ISIC conference and community.

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Information Services and Digital Literacy provides an alternative perspective for understanding information services and digital literacy, and argues that a central problem in the age of the social web and the culture of participation is that we do not know the premises of how we know, and how ways of interacting with information affect our actions and their outcomes.

ARKDIS project maps the implications and opportunities of the digitalisation of information and information work in the domain of archaeology and to develop and evaluate conceptual and practical methods and procedures for enhancing archaeological information work in the digitalised environment.

About me

Isto Huvila

Isto Huvila is working on management and organisation of what we know and how we know in contexts ranging from social media to more traditional arenas of learning and working. My special areas of expertise are organisational information, social media, health, archives, libraries, museums and cultural heritage.